I can only assume they mean "made available" on computers supplied to them. No reason they couldn't already be using this on their own computers. Although, I do wonder what kind of restrictions the IT staff has at the Capitol building.

skype was properly protected from prying government eyes. MS will open the flood gates, and in return get more uptake from the government sectors.Corporates with anything to hid will run back to blackberries

Surely there's some Open Source tool they could use? Of course SIP and strong encryption are easy to put together, the real benefit of Skype is the phonebook service mapping names to their Internet locations. All other OSS video solutions I'm aware of require knowing an IP addy/domain name/URL for your destination.

Members and staff can now use popular video teleconferencing services within the House network to communicate with constituents.

Skype says that their engineers have worked with the Congressional network security team to ensure the security of the communication channel.

I would assume they have a very strict IT policy, with every single network app needing pre-approval. At least, that's what I'd require, and lock incoming and outgoing ports down to the bare minimum with the heaviest security and packet filtering and require only encrypted channels. I think the concern here was verifying encryption... and they had to wait for Weiner to resign since I'm sure they have a "no weiners on Skype" policy.

The following policy announcement is still in effect (since early 2006) at a federal work site I am closely aligned with. It's not one of the traditional three letter agencies hyper concerned with security. Acronyms have been replaced for non-bureaucrat readability.

[Federal Agency] Policy on The Use of Skype Internet Telephony Software on [Federal Agency] Computers and Networks

Internet telephony, also known as Voice over IP (VoIP), has greatly increased in popularity and use over the past few years. One p

Exactly.
But hey, if you look at Microsoft's LIS draft [conceivablytech.com], you'll see that there is nothing to worry about, and/or nothing a Congress member will worry about, or understand.
(And just to quote TFA from yesterday: "A request for clarification we sent to Microsoft has remained unanswered so far.")

I wonder how many people are going to find a reason to complain about this? And i wonder how many of those people would have complained if the announcement had been made before Skype was purchased by Microsoft?

I ask this because i admit that my initial response was "oh look, the government is buying into the Microsoft monoculture once again" before i stopped myself and realized that wasn't very fair.

Well, my first thought would be that the use of Skype to reduce costs will translate into calls made from laptops on airplanes. Congressman will not stop traveling or cut their spending, they will just use it to the arsenal of tools that can be used to consume the tax payer money.

The problem isn't representative democracy, the problem is a bloated federal goverment. People like to look at people who are opposed to big federal programs as anarchist/libertarians who believe in no government, when in reality the problem is that the country is too big and too diverse to operate with so much power and so many programs going on at a FEDERAL level. Notice how when you step down to state and local governments it is more representative of the people it.... represents. That's not an argument

Case in point, the US is not a great country. It's a country where it's obsession with taxes is leading to deteriorating infrastructure and no collective will to pay for fixing any of it. Civilizations that don't maintain their infrastructure generally collapse. The US had it's brief moments in the sun, but realistically it was an ascendant superpower from say 1900 to 2005. It's already in decline.

Same here. I'm always reminded of an old IBM commercial(?) which featured this businessman in his office where some tech was installing a new video conferencing system and explaining how great it was and how it was going to save the company lots of money because they wouldn't have to pay for this guy to travel all over the place. Meanwhile, he's looking at the pictures on his wall of all of his trips around the world and obviously thinking, "This sucks."

Wellll my problem isnt that ms owns skype now, but rather that they just introduced the patent to evesdrop on skype calls. I prefer my elective representatives use stronger security but hey what do i know?

Well i'm not suggesting that the decision should be accepted blindly either, just that we should be judging it on the technical merits, not based on the very recent (especially considering the pace at which the US government works) acquisition by Microsoft.

Wellll my problem isnt that ms owns skype now, but rather that they just introduced the patent to evesdrop on skype calls. I prefer my elective representatives use stronger security but hey what do i know?

Yes, what do you know? The patent was filed 2 years ago. That article was just someone with too much time connecting tangentially related dots and drawing wild conclusions.

Wellll my problem isnt that ms owns skype now, but rather that they just introduced the patent to evesdrop on skype calls. I prefer my elective representatives use stronger security but hey what do i know?

Whoever intercepts the phone calls, and decides which calls to put on wikileaks and which to hide.

If you want to make their phone calls readable, you have to have a mechanism where they're ALL published in the open, and not merely readable by whoever can hack an Autonomous System carrying their call.

my initial response was "oh look, the government is buying into the Microsoft monoculture once again" before i stopped myself and realized that wasn't very fair.

It's more fair than you think. Even before the MS purchase, Skype was a monoculture just as bad: a nonstandard voip protocol with one single implementation, not interoperable with anything else, with a userbase almost entirely sustained by network effects. People "need" Skype because they want to talk to other people to use Skype (who in turn inst

I'm not complaining, because they're not my government. If they were, I wouldn't be posting on Slashdot, I'd be complaining directly to them. My complaint would have nothing to do with Microsoft (I keep forgetting they own Skype now), I'd be complaining that they were buying a proprietary communications tool, using a protocol that has not been peer-reviewed for security, without a second source, and giving a commercial entity the benefit of government-backed network effects, distorting the market consider

I doubt they're using the stock version. The federal government does have the budget and gravitas to demand special things and Skype must be falling over backwards to accommodate them just for the PR alone. Until we have more details, its a little presumptuous to think that they have the stock version.

I do not have documentary proof, but a friend of a friend knows people who were active in the recent Egyptian revolution. Many had made Skype calls to each other. Purportedly, after gaining access to the secret police headquarters in Cairo (and preventing the remaining secret police from destroying evidence), they found recordings (not transcripts, recordings) of their Skype calls in the secret police headquarters. This strongly suggests the presence of a Skype backdoor. This should surprise no one.

.. or a trojan present on the computer of one of the parties. Every Skype call, regardless of the crypto, still starts and ends totally naked in the sound chip (or speakers headphones, if you are concerned with more traditional surveillance)

Now we know why Microsoft paid that price for Skype. They have a new cash cow gov't contract. The purchase by MS (or similar big corp capable of supporting large gov't contracts) may have even closed the Skype deal for Congress. Surely, Congress is most comfortable with the known entity vs. the unknown. (...and don't call me Shirley.)

in light of Microsoft may add evesdropping to Skype [slashdot.org] this is a really stupid idea - but then in light of some of the other "ideas" that come out of government in general and this one in particular we should be happy they're not actually going to conference in big business purposely.

Presumably this is only so that congressmen can talk to non-congressmen. They would surely use their own internal system to talk to each other. In general, I would have thought that most non-congressmen would jump at the chance to travel to meet a congressman. So who's travel is being saved here ?

Now that Microsoft is thinking about patenting the ability to let law enforcement folks tap VoIP conversations when wrongdoing is suspected, our beloved congress persons will have to do their dirty deals without using Skype. What Will We Do?